Bonding atoms gameplay

Over the past few months I've been looking at gameplay and core mechanics. I've been looking at games such as Cloud and flOw and other, smaller games (usually student-produced - the ones that crop up in game competitions, etc), to look at what makes them interesting, novel and accessible.

I also found a sentence .. lost the speaker now.. about learning in games. Something about twitch games helping you to learn how to utilize your finger. It made me think.

Apart from the usual - inherent learning in a videogame - learning a mechanic, overcoming challenges, etc, when one looks at games like, Re-Mission, you learn because of the content, but you are engaged because of the mechanic. I suppose there is also learning due to the mechanic - shooting cancer cells does tend to imply you want to get rid of the little buggers.

Then, taking a look at guitar hero - it's a weird thing ... all these people who are very good at pressing coloured plastic buttons. If there was a bridge,.. to get them to move on from the plastic buttons to making chords .. we'd have thousands of excellent guitarists. I'm not saying that's what the designers should have done. They wanted to make a fun, accesissible game, and thats what they did. I just woner if guitar hero, rock band, etc's popularity is going to mean an increased uptake of musical instruments by people, or whether the virtuosity stays just with the button pushing on a controller.

All that made me think of a bonding atoms mechanism. would there be any point if you had to be a chemist to play the game? Conversely, would it still be 'meaningful' if it was stripped of all it's chemical richness and turned into 'gameplay'? I don't know .... but I've been churning over the idea for the past few months ..... After working out a (relatively) simple bunch of mechanisms that reflect and utilize some key concepts in chemistry - valency, ionic and covalent bonding, period table, etc .. i've been wondering about context, and looking to create one for the chemical mechanisms.

I'll write up my contextual game design proposals, later.. but suffice to say, I have been working towards a metagame that is a natural extension of this mechanic. I haven't found it yet, but i believe there's a really nice, simple, clean and obvious game that could come about from the gameplay.